Media Magazine Evaluation by Samah Ibtes

As for our AS Media course, we were assigned to do a music magazine front cover in which we had to get into groups of 3 or 4. We were allowed to pick any genre and an age group the magazine should appeal for.
The people in my group were Brooke, Andy and Faruke. After careful consideration, we decided that our genre was going to be pop as the genre of pop has changed dramatically over the years with different artists and bands coming and going. The name of our music magazine is “PopWave”- as this title gets straight to the point of what kind of music we have inside our magazine. We also decided that our target audience was going to be 9-16 year olds as pop is usually associated with this age group and is very popular among teenagers.
My group decided that we were going to have a monthly issue of each magazine in which the order is:
Andy: October issue
Faruke: November issue
Brooke: December issue
Me (Samah): January issue

My initial idea of the music magazine front cover was to have one person standing in front of the camera surrounded by balloons and party poppers looking directly at the camera, smiling as this connotates celebration as new years was going be my chosen theme.
The reason this wasn’t possible was because I realized that having a traditional theme of new years was pretty much predictable on a January issue of any kind of magazine. In order to attract audience more, we need to engage them by doing something different but still relating to them.

For one day my group were given a camera and we went around the whole school, also bringing along props such as balloons and party poppers for taking our magazine. We took a series of different kinds of shots all over the college and we had to think deeply about how we were going to operate and change the picture into making it look like an actual music magazine.

Before starting our front cover, the whole class were a given a tutorial into how to use Adobe Photoshop. An application in which is used to edit, fix and/or create pictures. This was a one-day lesson where we were shown how to add/edit texts on images, cropping and pasting on images, changing brightness and contrast etc.

When actually starting to do our cover, the reason I picked the image was because the people in my image are around the same age group as the target audience. They are all wearing dark colours in contrast to the bright background this was so because they would stand out more instead of blending in with the background this is to symbolise a message to the audience telling them: “Stand out more in life and to get more noticed, that’s what the people in the magazine did and look where they are now!”
The genre of pop is different compared to other types of music. Pop doesn’t tell anyone to dress a certain way whereas rock tells the audience that wearing black is cool and hip hop tells the audience that talking and acting a certain way will take you places. Pop allows people to think for themselves without having to look like anyone or dressing like them. This is shown in my front cover by having a four people sitting on steps of stairs as my main cover image, in their own way and attitude dressing completely different to one another.

The ways in which I challenged the conventions of a real music magazine was the theme of my cover. I did previous research on typical music January issue magazines and most of them had many different kinds of messages to wish the audience a ‘Happy Year’. I did this differently, by having my main cover line talk about the people in my main cover image which was the band ‘Candi’ starting a new year back at school. This could relate to the audience as they are students who could dislike education but could give out a message that even their favourite group have to deal with the fact of going to school.

The media institutions that may distribute my magazine are billboards and newspaper articles. This is because they are easy to get to around and the public are more likely to see the magazine being advertised rather if on TV Ads they have a chance of seeing but none is certain because people usually change the channels when the adverts are up.

I attracted my audience by using bold fonts ad colours. The magazine was aimed at both sexes so I used colours that boys and girls can both relate to.

If I did the magazine again, I would change the colour of the main cover line because it blended in with the colour of the costumes the people were wearing. I would have included more exciting stories in the magazine about music artists and celebrities.

In doing this magazine, I have learnt many things about music and the reasons for why the music industry is so popular. I have learnt that people use music for their entertainment or their own way of spending their free time.

I really enjoyed this task!!!!